by James Axler
“And Ninurta couldn’t interact at all,” Brigid continued. “He just hung there.”
“I couldn’t see him,” Grant said. “Still can’t.”
“I think that there’s a reason for that, too,” Brigid said excitedly. “Frequencies.”
“Frequencies?” Kane queried. “You’re going to have to explain.”
“You understand wavelengths and frequencies, yes?” Brigid asked them all. “Like the way you tune a radio, finding different frequencies. Sight works in essentially the same way. We see within a certain range of wavelengths, tuning in, if you will, to a certain frequency. Color is created in this way—other creatures see in different wavelengths, some, like dogs, barely see any difference in color, others, like honeybees, are especially tuned to the ultraviolet end of the spectrum so that they see plants and flowers in an entirely different manner than the way our eyes perceive them.
“We haven’t been blinded,” Brigid said, “not really. Each of us can see, but we’re seeing in an altered way, the details coming to us in a manner we are not used to. We’re tuning into a different frequency than what we’ve used before.”
“Like infrared or night vision,” Kane said, nodding in understanding. He was thinking about the polymer-coated lenses the Cerberus members sometimes employed to see in the dark.
Brigid smiled. “Yes, and if that manipulation was subtle, each of us might be tuned to see slightly differently. Hence, the soldiers that we walked in on in Libya being almost unable to perceive us at all. And Grant’s inability to see Ninurta when he could see the more powerful signal of Nergal.”
“When blindness isn’t blindness at all,” Kane said incredulously. “It all makes a kind of sense.”
“But what’s caused it?” Mariah asked. “If Nergal is just old data, as you say...”
“The Mirror of Prester John,” Brigid said, “which is to say—whatever’s left of it. When Grant shattered it, the pieces were superheated and strewn across the interior of the pyramid, which included an interphase window used for access—a kind of security door.”
“Yeah, I remember,” Kane said.
“We know that Annunaki technology is organically based, alive,” Brigid continued, “in a rudimentary manner at least. Shattering the mirror might have destroyed it, but the pieces still retain data—the same way a shattered hologram retains information from the whole image. If you break a hologram, you don’t see a part—you see a smaller hologram of the same projection.”
“And we’re seeing those projections?” Grant questioned.
“I think that what we’re seeing is an effect known as Troxler’s fading,” Brigid said. “Troxler’s fading is an optical illusion that affects one’s visual perception. In essence, when a person fixates on a particular point, even for just a short period, an unchanging stimulus away from that point will fade away and disappear.”
“So we stop seeing the background,” Kane said.
“It’s how we focus,” Brigid said, “and it probably derives from a survival mechanism, ensuring that we spot predators rather than being bewildered by peripheral input. The brain is also inclined to fill in the gaps in our perception, generating data for the mind so that we do not get distracted by our physiological blind spots.
“Simply put—what you see isn’t always what you get,” Brigid concluded.
“So the mirror fragments are affecting our vision,” Kane said, “and the vision of those around us, making everyone susceptible, to a greater or lesser extent, to seeing the old Annunaki recordings of Nergal and Ninurta. How do we test this?”
Grant shrugged. “Shoot Nergal?”
“That’s...not going to do it,” Brigid said after a moment’s thought. “If the shards of the mirror are the transmitters, then we’d need to somehow stop their broadcast.”
“And how do you propose we do that, Baptiste?” Kane asked.
To Mariah, with her twentieth-century sensibilities, it sounded as though Kane had just hit on the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.
Chapter 17
Brewster Philboyd looked up from his monitoring screen as Lakesh came striding past. “CAT Beta are not responding,” Philboyd said.
The Cerberus ops room was enjoying a midmorning lull as operatives took coffee breaks away from their screens. There were still staff in situ, with several running monitoring algorithms for the satellite eyes that orbited Earth, tracking anomalies and supplying Cerberus with data.
Like others, Lakesh was enjoying a hot beverage—in his case, a cup of tea, brewed to golden brown with perhaps just a little too much milk. He stopped in his tracks at his colleague’s words, the tea in his cup slopping dangerously close to the rim. “Did you say CAT Beta?” Lakesh asked.
“Uh-huh,” Philboyd confirmed with a nod of his head. “They jumped to Redoubt Mike fifty-seven minutes ago and they’ve not reported in since then.”
“Since the jump?” Lakesh asked, and Philboyd nodded. “Do we know that they arrived?”
Philboyd tapped an instruction into his keyboard and the image on his monitor screen changed, flickering to a chart showing energy usage for sender-receiver stations in the mat-trans grid. Redoubt Mike’s station showed a spike in activity confirming the arrival of someone or something. “The figures match up time-wise,” Philboyd stated. “There’s no reason to doubt their arrival. Unless, perhaps, they were intercepted and replaced at the moment of dematerialization.”
Lakesh nodded thoughtfully as he looked for somewhere to put his cup down. There was established precedence for what Philboyd proposed. Such a thing had happened before to Cerberus when an Australian faction called the Original Tribe had piggybacked on the mat-trans signal, sending their own operatives in place of CAT Alpha during a return trip to the Cerberus redoubt. However, such an occurrence was a one-off, and the protective firewalls and other safety measures that theoretically ring-fenced the system had been strengthened tenfold in light of that attack.
“Let’s presume not,” Lakesh advised as he placed his cup of tea on the desk adjacent to Philboyd’s and rested in the swivel chair there. “An hour’s delay between arrival and confirmation is not unprecedented,” he said, “but it is certainly cause for concern. I trust that you have tried hailing Beta?”
“Yes, of course,” Philboyd said. “No answer.”
“Telemetry on the biolinks?” Lakesh queried.
“No response. Which could be a side effect of the redoubt’s being underground.”
“Almost certainly so,” Lakesh agreed. “But an hour is a long time to not receive a report. Who was leading the team?”
“Edwards,” Philboyd confirmed. “With Sinclair and Domi.” He looked uncomfortable as he said the last name, aware that Lakesh had a romantic arrangement with the petite albino woman and not wanting to make this a personal matter.
“Why were they going to Mike?” Lakesh asked.
“They received a tip-off,” Philboyd said, “the nature of which Edwards chose not to elaborate. The trader Ohio Blue brought them information that led them to check the redoubt.”
Lakesh nodded solemnly. “Keep on top of it, Mr. Philboyd,” he said. “Keep trying their Commtacts every ten minutes and let me know if you receive any response.”
“Yes, sir.”
* * *
GATHERED CLOSE TO the base of the far side of the pyramid in the sweltering Congo, the four Cerberus rebels were pondering all that Brigid had intuited.
“How did the mirror shards get to Libya?” Mariah asked, breaking the silence that reigned among her colleagues. “That’s a journey of over two thousand miles, isn’t it?” Thanks to her discipline in her chosen field of geology, Mariah’s knowledge of geography was impressive.
“Something like that,” Brigid agreed. “And you’re right—how did the broken slivers of the mirro
r make their way so far across land and end up buried in a mine?”
“The mine wasn’t there before,” Mariah said with certainty. “The earth tremor I detected that started all of this was indicative of its appearance, I think.”
“What was that earth tremor?” Brigid asked, questioning herself as much as Mariah. Before her colleague could respond, she proposed an answer. “You called it a sinkhole, back when you spotted it on the data filtering through from the area. A sinkhole is relatively sudden, appearing almost instantaneously, isn’t it?”
“There are changes below the surface creating it,” Mariah said, “but from the surface it does appear instant.”
“But what if this wasn’t a sinkhole?” Brigid questioned. “What if this was an instantaneous transfer of the hole, the mine, the whole camp?”
“How?” Mariah asked.
“Matter transmitter,” Brigid said. “The Annunaki had access to the interphaser network, used it for their own transportation. Heck, they used it as the doorway into this very pyramid, hiding the entry in an almost inaccessible pass. If an interphase window was used, it could have shunted the mirror’s shards two thousand miles north to Libya.”
“That’s one big interphase window,” Grant said.
“Like the pillar we came through to get here,” Brigid reminded him.
“But why would anyone want to do that?” Kane asked. “Move the broken bits of the mirror of Prester John thousands of miles away.”
“They weren’t moving them,” Brigid said, “they were gathering them. The interphaser, like the mat-trans, uses a focusing beam to dematerialize and rematerialize a subject. If that beam could be widened somehow, like casting a net, then theoretically it might be used to regather the parts of an object like the mirror. Cast the net wide enough and make the rematerialization sequence focused enough and you’d end up gathering things on a molecular level, squishing them all together until you could, theoretically, re-create something that had been destroyed. I think.”
“You think?” Kane repeated, a challenge in his voice.
“Why else would the mirror fragments end up where they have?” Brigid asked.
“If they have,” Kane reminded her. “It’s still just a theory, right?”
“If I’m right, then we’ve been fighting something here, in Nergal, that’s trying to re-create the Annunaki pantheon from the scattered memory of a recording device,” Brigid said. “Memories whose wavelength spectrum has been compromised to the point that the results can only be seen through particular fields of vision.”
“Which leads us to the question,” Kane said, “who’s trying to put the Annunaki back together?”
Before anyone could respond, Grant made a gesture, warning everyone to hush. Someone was approaching, a figure moving through the lush vegetation whose movements were loud to his trained ear. “Company,” he whispered.
Kane stood and so did Grant, their movements barely making a sound. Without a word, they disappeared into the dense foliage, leaving Brigid alone with Mariah. Brigid rested her hand on the grip of the stolen sword, her only weapon at this moment.
* * *
KANE AND GRANT moved swiftly through the trees, splitting up and coming around the back of the group that was approaching. There were four men in the group, young, agile and muscular—more than that was hard to tell with their compromised eyesight. Each man held a weapon, knives mostly, though one had what appeared to be a spear. Two of them had the blindfolds over their eyes, though they seemed to be able to see as normally as their colleagues. That whole radiance of new vision, Kane realized bitterly, cursing the Annunaki.
Kane crept behind a broad tree trunk, pressing himself against it and peering out to watch the four men as they made their way through the cover. They were searching left and right, checking under bushes and behind trees. It was obvious that they were looking for the Cerberus team, and Kane presumed there must be more men out there searching in different spots.
Kane slipped back behind the tree as the group came closer, ducking his head down and creeping away to the next tree in the dense jungle.
Grant’s voice reverberated in his ear as Kane reached the next tree. “In position,” Grant said.
Kane surveyed the surrounding area, was unsurprised that he could not spot his partner. Grant knew how to hide, even when his own eyesight was drawn in shadows and grays. “Position,” Kane confirmed, slipping around the tree like a serpent.
There was no noise. Grant simply emerged from the huge leaves of an overhanging bush, stepped up behind the rearmost of the armed men and dragged him back, his hand clamped over the man’s mouth.
Grant delivered a nerve pinch to the man’s neck and the man drooped in his grip. He rolled him gently to the ground.
One of the search party turned, not alerted by the noise—for there had been none—but simply alert enough to check where he had been as well as where he was going. His voice rose in alarm as he saw Grant drop his unconscious colleague to the dirt.
Kane leaped at that cry, seizing the opportunity to attack the men’s flank as they turned to see why their colleague had shouted the warning. Kane was behind the closest of them, reaching around the man and pulling him up off his feet even as they charged toward Grant. The man flipped in Kane’s grip, legs tangling as he went crashing to the ground, face-first.
Grant had adopted a fighter’s crouch as the other two came at him, rolled his shoulders and barged into the man on the left—who was wielding the spear—flipping him in an instant. The one on the right lurched to follow Grant, cutting the air with a swish of his knife. Grant dropped, coming in below the man’s attack before driving both hands upward to knock the man’s knife hand aside. Grant’s foe stumbled, dropping the knife as sudden pain fired through his arm.
Grant was upright again in an instant, swinging a haymaker at his opponent’s jaw with enough force to knock him off his feet.
At Grant’s back, Kane was tackling the other opponent again. The man rose, bringing his knife up to stab at Kane. Kane blocked, diverting the passage of the arm holding the knife, twisting it so that the man was forced to step forward or fall.
Kane stepped back in the same instant, his arm still locked with his opponent’s, dragging him another step, two, until he was lurching in an awkward stumble. Kane spun, driving a forceful kick to the man’s posterior and sending him crashing into the trunk of a nearby tree. The man hit it headfirst with a strike that sounded like a hammer hitting a coconut, birds alighting from its higher branches. In the aftermath, the man sagged to the ground, losing himself in the dense foliage that grew around the foot of the tree.
The man with the spear was back on his feet, moving more warily this time as he circled toward Grant. Though his eyesight was compromised, Grant fixed his attention on the end of the spear.
The spear jabbed, and Grant stepped back, judging its length and his adversary’s reach. His opponent tried again, jabbing out with the spear, forcing Grant back. Kane was coming around the side of the man now—any moment and it would be two against one.
The spearman took his chance, stepping into his lunge as he thrust the spear at Grant a third time.
Grant was ready this time, grabbed it and twisted, turning the spear in the man’s grip so that he lost his footing. At the same time, Grant raced forward, leaping up on one leg and delivering a high kick to his opponent’s chest. The blow struck like a clap of thunder, sending the man reeling backward, his grip on the spear slipping.
As the spearman came lurching toward him, Kane drew back his fist. “Buckle up, buttercup,” he muttered before driving his fist into the man’s face with enough force to knock him out cold.
“All done?” Grant asked, standing amid the strewn bodies in the clearing.
“Four for four,” Kane confirmed. “But I guess it won’t be long before someo
ne else comes looking. We’d better get moving.”
* * *
KANE AND GRANT returned to their two colleagues, wary of pursuit. “They’re sending out search parties,” Kane explained dourly. “We aced the first one but they’re going to keep coming unless we do something about the Nergal-ogram and his glowing brother.”
Brigid nodded, eyeing the shadow pyramid where it waited on the horizon of her altered vision.
“We figure out who’s behind this?” Kane asked. “Who’s trying to put the Annunaki back together?”
Brigid shook her head. Kane’s was a good question but she did not have an answer; she couldn’t even guess who would do such a thing, let alone why. There had been some really wacky devotees to Ullikummis, the stone god whose presence on Earth had been accompanied with a growing cult of fanatic followers. Those followers still existed, albeit in small clumps scattered across the US. But this thing—not just here but in the recent incidents in Spain and Italy—pointed to either a larger group or a lone operator with vast reach.
“Baptiste?” Kane prompted after a few moments.
“Sorry, lost in thought,” Brigid replied.
“So,” Grant asked, “where does this leave us with the whole mirror-broadcast thing?”
“It’s obvious that we need to stop the broadcast somehow,” Brigid said, “but with so many fragments—”
“Plus my eyesight still ain’t so good,” Kane reminded her. “Yours?”
“No,” Brigid said. “But I think if we can nix the broadcast that will return. You pretty much confirmed that when you threw the wrench in the works back there.”
“The wrench being one of Nergal’s adoring fans,” Kane said, smiling.
“I can’t figure out a way to destroy the whole thing in one sweep,” Brigid concluded. “We can do parts but we need to get to the source or it will just keep broadcasting.”
“Why don’t we do what we always do and blast it to hell?” Kane asked.
“You mean the mine?” Grant asked.